I like to program in living color. My color scheme is definitely “angry fruit salad”, but there is a method to my madness.
My eyeglasses have a very strong prescription. Chromatic aberration is significant at the edges of my field of vision, so it is important that text be mostly monochromatic, or it will split into tiny glyph-shaped spectra. So my main text color is green on a black background, like a terminal from the 1970s. From there, I chose cyan for comments in the code because it is easy to read. I generally favor the warmer colors for the more “active” elements and the cooler colors for the more “passive” ones, but there are many exceptions.
I have found that my brain gets used to the colors. When something shows up in an unexpected color, it immediately look wrong, even if I don’t know why. I can leverge this effect by using a very wide variety of colors for different semantic elements. I’m not consciously aware of the semantic meaning, I can just tell if the code looks the wrong color.
So my code looks like the Vegas strip: gaudy, neon colors fighting for attention. I’m sure it would drive many people up the wall. A VSCode theme sort of based on this is available at https://github.com/jrm-code-project/VSCode-Theme.
1 comment:
I see that you have seen this blog post of mine on chromatic aberration (since you commented on it), but others might be interested too: https://scottlburson2.blogspot.com/2016/01/lcd-backlights-and-eyeglass-lenses.html
I am still wearing the pair of glasses described in that post, almost a decade later!
I too have long used #88FF88 as my primary foreground color, on a #000060 dark blue background — a combination I settled on as soon as I started using color monitors, about 1988, and have never had reason to change. I find the dark blue feels less contrasty than black, without diminishing legibility.
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